


Music Notes on Stray Napkins

by JellyfishPublishing



Category: Classicaloid (Anime)
Genre: Definitely before episode 3, Gen, Just a character noticing a small habit, Set during the earlier episodes of first season
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-01-03
Packaged: 2019-02-27 16:18:57
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13251954
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JellyfishPublishing/pseuds/JellyfishPublishing
Summary: As Kanae cleans up, she finds curious things from those strange house guests of hers





	Music Notes on Stray Napkins

**Author's Note:**

> [A.N] One of the first stories I wrote for the show and I thought I'd start posting some of my stories here.

She’s finding more of them now.

 

Before, when the two strange men with stranger hair colors showed up at her doorstep with invitations from her _father_ to stay; besides the fact these men knew her dead-beat father, she really didn’t give them much thought.

 

She barely gave a care about their names, because really, they obviously weren’t Japanese, but those names had to have been aliases. She tried not to care about what they did around the house, besides their terrible proclivity for nearly wrecking the place every passing minute, and tried to ignore them as best as those two could go on being ignored. She filed them away with the rest of her father’s trash, things he foisted on her as he ran away from her, his debts, her grandmother’s death—really, she barely gave them the time of day in the beginning.

 

So if these had always been here, always balled up and thrown outside the trash can or stuffed into small, hiding places, she wouldn’t exactly be the best person to confirm or deny it. She had never found the napkins before though. It wasn’t always napkins either, sometimes it was just pads of post-it notes that were lying around or scrawlings in old notebooks she’s left on tables and chairs while she’s trying to clean out some of the other rooms.

 

(She has to work at her cleaning now, trying to make the house look better now that she cares, now that she can’t forget the sight of Grandma dancing, young and happy and full of the same life she had when Kanae was just a little girl)

 

Sometimes, rarer times, the music is on actual, stray pieces of paper. But it’s always the same thing on them all. Kanae may not know how to play an organ, but she recognizes music notes when she sees them.

 

Small things, fractions of songs, of melodies, that are sometimes scratched out and tossed like a forgotten thought or a bitten off word. Sometimes it dissolves, almost humorously, into ingredients for gyoza. She’s studied those long enough to know when the writing is Beethoven and when it’s Mozart. Her eyes trace messy, rushed notes and words, some symbols that seem familiar and other’s she’s not sure of. It’s a jumble of lunacy, chaos in thick, black writing, and she thinks of his bursts of passion about ingredients and the ramblings about perfection on getting the oil and the heat just right. She thinks it must be hell in that brain of his.

 

Mozart’s writing is more like the man himself, little pieces of things she saw on colored post it notes or in those cute day planners she’ll never use; all loopy and fancy and cluttered. It’s prettier than even her own writing and she might actually be annoyed at that if she wasn’t so busy trying to idenitify what she remembers of reading music. She remembers the tiny bit of piano she used to play with her grandmother, and she would tell herself it was all practice for the organ. Of course it wasn’t really, especially when she stared down at the gleaming, immaculate teeth of the organ, twice as many keys and, by default, twice as terrifying when compared to the friendly piano her Grandma would help her up to. Even after, when her tiny legs that couldn’t even touch the steps grew longer with age, she still found she couldn’t play it. (It was all too much that one day, the day after the funeral that no one else attended, that her father couldn’t even be bothered to show up to, because she saw her grandmother in the keys and it hurt too much and she’d just been alive and now she was---and she wasn’t ready, she just wasn’t ready, she wasn’t-).

 

From what she can remember of those impromptu lessons, she thinks it must be pretty and light, loud and boisterous, and much like his terrible pudding cake, filled with way too much gelatin and sugar (and it probably has some sort of perverted chord in there somewhere, knowing that man).

 

So she finds messy, illegible chicken scratch and loopy, cluttered scribbles on pieces of paper all over the house and she’s collecting them now because she just cleaned this room and if they’re going to leave their trash everywhere then the least they could do is start paying their rent and extra for the fact she’s basically their maid now---!

 

Except there she is, standing in the middle of the door way, arms full of any scrap of napkin or paper with their handwriting on it, when she sees them. Or well, when she hears them. Beethoven is humming, under his breath, low and deep, and it’s powerful and his hands are waving to the rhythm, sometimes making erratic jerks this way and that way as his muffled voice grows louder. She can’t see the expression he must be making but notes the stiff, taut lines of his shoulders and remembers the way he looked up on top of the house, conducting the madness and the dancing with the wild yet precise movements of his arms. Her eyes move to the boiling pot in front of him, watching his hands hover above the steam. They’re too close and she thinks of tell him that he’ll burn himself (what are you doing, you idiot?!) but he seems unaffected by the heat at all. He looks like he’s casting a spell and, with all that’s happened to her these last few weeks, she wouldn’t put it past the man.

 

She catches a light, melodic voice and turns her attention to the side towards the table, seeing Mozart also humming away. His voice is louder, his mouth opening on some parts to let the note linger or the sound to ring out clearer. His eyes are bright and focused on the skateboard he’s laid out on the table (she has to bite her tongue and only just stops short of yelling at him since the top of the board is at least laying on the table and that part of the table isn’t her side at least) and he’s rolling the wheels with his fingertips, watching it spin round and round effortlessly. He seems to nod at this, smile widening, but his humming never stops.

 

The two men aren’t even humming the same thing but it mingles and mixes, harmoniously filtering through the air as visible as the steam from the pot or the sunlight through the window and Kanae has lost her anger. She has lost her thoughts from before. She is just left standing there, arms full of sparse thoughts and disconnected melodies, and she….. She hears it. Faintly. In the back of her mind, the tinkling of piano keys and of a melody she has never heard of before.


End file.
